Hello there. So what is Guardian America, what makes a British newspaper think that Americans will want to imbibe its view of America and the world, and why, having decided to undertake such an improbable project, would the paper place it in my hands? Fine questions. Let's explore.

The journalistic shorthand version is that Guardian America is the US-based website of the Guardian newspaper of London and Manchester, which will combine content produced in the UK and around the world with content that we originate here to create a Guardian especially tailored to American readers. I am sometimes asked what, or who, this means we will try to be "like"; the questioner wants an American reference point the better to slot this project into a known category. The only answer is that we will try to be like ... the Guardian.

Which means what? Well, the paper was founded in 1821 "to promote the liberal interest" in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre. Now, I confess that I don't know what that was. But it sounds bad, and I've been around the block enough times to know that journals founded in response to events like massacres tend to be pretty reliable, from my point of view, more or less across the board.

So Guardian America will, yes, promote the liberal interest. Not with a sledgehammer; one of the most important liberal interests, after all, is in free inquiry, debate, scepticism, even about one's own positions. But I suspect that, among the Americans who like the Guardian, one of the things they like is that the paper expresses its view of the world a bit more openly than American newspapers do.

This will mean looking at the events of the day from a slightly different angle than US papers, and focusing in on some matters that they might ignore, as I have in my interview with Hillary Clinton. It will not mean, of course, that our standards of accuracy and fairness and fealty to fact will be anything but the highest. "Facts are sacred," said CP Scott, the man whose family placed the Guardian in trust 71 years ago the better to insulate it from the vicissitudes of the marketplace. That they are - and that does not change across either decades or oceans.

I notice reading back that I seem already to have answered the second question - above are the reasons why Americans would want to read this product. In fact, this isn't hypothetical. Many Americans, about five million a month (forgive me slipping into argot here, but more properly than "people", they're "unique users"), already do read the Guardian through its website - as well as the thousands who subscribe to the Guardian Weekly - for its excellent US and international coverage. We hope we're giving them more reasons still to read it.

We'll be adding, as we already have been, American commentary to the Guardian's groundbreaking Comment is free section. And let's not give short shrift, as so often happens on these occasions, to culture. In London, the Guardian's coverage of British culture, both high and mass, is without equal as far as I can see. We'll use as much of that as we think our American readers will find relevant, which is a lot, and we'll augment it with some excellent cultural coverage and criticism of our own. We debut with a piece of photography criticism by Richard Woodward, one of New York's leading arts and culture critics, who will be a regular fixture here, as will others of his calibre on art, books, music, film, theatre and other subjects.

We'll even cover sport, which I have insisted we call sports. (And don't worry, soccer/football fans - we understand that you come to the Guardian site to read the paper's excellent premier league coverage, so we won't stint on that). And although I won the battle of the plural -s on sports, I lost a futile argument in London over the summer about the utility of Americanizing (sorry, Americanising) certain spellings. Please read the elegant discussion of the Guardian's house style, and why Guardian America is adhering to it, by Inigo Thomas, a British writer based in New York who will write regularly for us on culture and society. He persuaded even me.

As for the why me question - well, you'd have to ask the people in London, but I'm glad they did. I've worked at American magazines most of my life, in New York and Washington. It may seem an odd time to enter, of all struggling industries, the newspaper business. But the Guardian is embracing the future, and has been for years. Reaching out across an ocean and a culture in an increasingly global world is proof enough of that. So we hope you'll check in regularly. Ta. That's thanks. But don't worry, it's not house style.